Is solar green?

03-18-2015, 03:28 PM

Or is it just alot of lead, copper, aluminum, silicon and plastic so hippies can have energy to refrigerate food and play games on their laptop with the lights on all night so they can brag to their friends how green they are being.

You build an off grid solar system when you can't get grid electricity, or you build an off grid system when you want to learn how much energy 500 kilowatthours a month really is, and once you see that you need 30 280w panels for $8500 on your roof and about 2000 pounds of toxic lead for $4000 and $3000 worth of electronics and another $2000 for lots of wire and racking and breakers and boxes you begin to realize it's not that green or cheap unless you reduce your consumption. Or at least skip the 2000 pounds of lead and cooperate with "the man" and build a grid-tie setup.

This is a real life example, I built an off grid solar system for my tie dye wearing car driving refrigerator using hot shower loving hippies here on big island Hawaii. I showed them I could ride my bicycle 130 miles from Kona Hawaii to Pahoa Hawaii ascending 9500ft descending 8800ft OVER THE VOLCANOES and pulling a 50 lb trailer on raw local grown fruits and veggies to make a point about energy but they still believe in cars and solar food refrigeration. I pull their kids around in a bicycle trailer and I stay over 15mph but that is not fast enough for them, they need a Subaru with a 100kw engine so they can get places "in efficient time".

Now they're a little sad they spent $4000 for a system that only puts out 3 KWh a day and consumes their lives cause they opted for the cheap made in china charge controller which needs to manually be switched from bulk to float, gotta keep checking every few hours with a specific gravity reading, they thought Midnite and Morningstar and Outback were too expensive.

Now they need to expand their system with alot more money to have enough power to refrigerate their junkfood, I power my bicycle rides with raw fruits and veggies, but they still want a fridge. They act like experts when it comes to energy, saying there is enough energy in the waves and vibrations in nature around them to power their car and they want me to build it for them (since they don't know how) so they have a machine to carry them everywhere so they don't have to do anything but be happy and play guitar and drum and have sex and everything will be fine.

I wanted to design them a grid tie system, but they wanted to be rebels off grid and opted for 500 pounds of lead. If the solar can't put out enough power they use the electric company's power for their fridge or the oven or the 10 led bulbs so they can stay up all night and eat drugs(chocolate night time theobromine drama).

Their electric hot water was using about 200-300 kilowatts a month so I designed them a solar hot water system instead.

Their slowly migrating to growing their own food and riding bicycles, maybe solar electric is green, if you learn it's dirty and you only need enough power for a laptop, not a fridge and lights to stay up all night.

Sometimes i'm not sure, they are too tired to ride bikes, sometimes they go on short bike rides, but they meditate all day to improve their energy, instead of planting food to get some real energy like me and my 200 mile bicycle rides.

Comment

When I was young I wanted to be an engineer, but looking around I saw all the toxic monstrosities humans were building and starting all the save the world from the machines drama. So I never went to college to be an engineer, I just took alot of machines apart to examine them myself, and I love reading on the internet.

Watching peoples ignorance of machines and just using them cause they're fun and someone else built them paralyzes me into thinking twice about having kids.

Do I want my kids trying to stop the hippie democrats from destroying the world? Or do I have kids and ride bicycles and grow food and try to be an example?

But we get bored of being green and get curious about nuclear reactors and spacecraft and fighter planes and tanks and 6000mph monorails and artificial intelligence.

Hippie watching is becoming a hobby of mine, I'm not sure what I intend to do with it.

Comment

I think this thread is a bit of a waste of valuable band width, seriously

FWIW, it might be worthy of a philosophical discussion if the sign over the door said "unrealistic '60's hippie burnout forum" instead of "Solar Panel Talk". But in that sense, it's no more a waste of bandwidth than any other off topic subject.

Comment

The point of my post is not to rag on people but to have conversation about teaching solar power truth.

I'm only 27 btw.

You appear to be something of an anachronism.

Also, I was apparently confused by your statement :"When I was young, I wanted to be an engineer".

When I was 27, I had not yet awakened to the possibilities of alternate energy. When I did, I changed careers. Trust me, you still have time.

When/if choose to do so, you may find that the truth about solar energy, such as it may exist in reality or only the mind, like most truth, is a slippery, sometimes vague concept and always subject to being "twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools", to quote Kipling.